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Enter Andromache from the house. She takes her place as a suppliant before the altar of Thetis in the orchestra.

Andromache

Andromache
Glory of Asia, city of Thebe! It was from you that I, Andromache, once came dowered with golden luxury to the royal house of Priam, given to Hector as lawful wife for the bearing of his children.
[5]
In days gone by I was a woman to be envied, but now I am, if any woman ever was, the paragon of misery. I saw my husband Hector killed by the hand of Achilles and I beheld Astyanax, the son I bore my husband,
[10]
hurled from the high battlements once the Greeks had captured the land of Troy. I myself, a member of a house most free, became a slave and was brought to Greece, given as the choicest of the Trojan spoil
[15]
to the islander Neoptolemus as his prize of war. I live now in the lands that border on Phthia here and the city of Pharsalia, lands where the sea-goddess Thetis, far from the haunts of men and fleeing their company, dwelt as wife with Peleus. The people of Thessaly
[20]
call it Thetideion in honor of the goddess's marriage. Here is where Achilles' son made his home, and he lets Peleus rule over the land of Pharsalia, being unwilling to take the sceptre during the old man's lifetime. In this house I have given birth to a manchild,
[25]
lying with Achilles' son, my master.

Euripides. Euripides, with an English translation by David Kovacs. Cambridge. Harvard University Press. forthcoming.

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